dessalles

The US Mint revealed their redesigned $5 bill last week, adding additional anti-counterfeit measures. Of them, the more interesting are the yellow EURion constellations that now grace the front and back:

The EURion is an Orion-inspired pattern of five, usually fairly small, symbols that are repeatedly incorporated into the design of currency to thwart digital replication. A fair amount of scanners and photocopiers will refuse to process a document if the pattern is detected. This system is fairly similar to the DocuColor Tracking Dots that are inconspicuously produced by many commercial color printers so government officials can track a document to the exact printer that produced it. Both are a form of Steganography, which according to Wikipedia “is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message”.

While I only just learned about the formal practice of Steganography today, it’s actually being employed on a project I’m currently working on. At Schematic, we’re designing a set of semi-public, touch-screen interfaces that need to communicate some information to a group of in-the-know superusers without detection by the primary users or onlookers. At one point we considered encoding information into the typography, but we eventually settled on some color coded ornamental elements. The reason we’re being so discreet is because the information could compromise the interaction between the super and primary users - a relationship critical to the success of the overall service we’re designing.

The idea of an interface having a secret secondary user is an interesting one and actually reminds me of another Schematic project. The Accenture Interactive Network Wall was a large, interactive display installed in a couple international airports back in 2006. The interface provided travelers access to information they might find useful while killing time before a flight - headlines, weather, scores, etc…

However, Accenture isn’t a consumer facing company. And the interactive wall, as an advertisement, wasn’t exactly “designed” for its users (something the 37signals blog didn’t exactly pick up on). The installation’s target was actually the busy corporate execs who probably wouldn’t take the time to try it out - i.e. people who might hire Accenture as a consulting company. And so, in a fairly crude sense, the idea was to grab the attention of these execs by gathering a crowd of people in front of some Accenture technology and slapping a big Accenture logo over their heads. Correspondingly, one of the design challenges was making sure the relevant information and branded elements were legible from within arms reach but also visible from 30 ft away. That’s not to say there’s any excuse for such an interface being difficult to use, but sometimes all is not what it seems.